


beauty is truth and terror

by alovelylight



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Childhood Memories, Coming of Age, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, jily au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-23
Updated: 2017-09-23
Packaged: 2019-01-04 08:24:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12165150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alovelylight/pseuds/alovelylight
Summary: (soulmate au where your tattoo gains life and color once you fall in love with your soulmate)There’s a lily blooming in front of his heart and he spends his life before her wondering what color it should be – white for purity? Scarlet for sin and sacrifice? Orange for desire and passion? He guesses it is all of them – after all, we are made up of multitudes.There are two antlers patterned on her rib cage and in her dreams they grow tall and strong enough to pierce the whole sky. She wonders if she can grow to be like these prongs, big enough to fill up a whole expanse of constellations.





	beauty is truth and terror

There’s a lily blooming in front of his heart and he spends his life before her wondering what color it should be – white for purity? Scarlet for sin and sacrifice? Orange for desire and passion? He guesses it is all of them – after all, we are made up of multitudes.

There are two antlers patterned on her rib cage and in her dreams they grow tall and strong enough to pierce the whole sky. She wonders if she can grow to be like these prongs, big enough to fill up a whole expanse of constellations.

\--

At the beginning of this story, James Potter is all knee scabs and messy hair and precocious chatter. Lily Evans is all butterfly hairclips and full smiles and relentless strings of questions.

He spends most of science class annoyed at the distractions of her dark red hair, the marks of paint on her arms, the green-eyed glare she sends his way when he pulls at her ponytail. She stands up for Sev against his taunts, stares down at him with monochromatic lens, and believes too hastily in the gilded love in her storybooks.

One day she shows up to class with her arm in a cast, although he sees no other sign of brokenness about her. She was playing at the park with Severus Snape and had slipped from the swings, although he is too eager to insist that it was slimy Snape’s doing. This causes her to yell at him, in that earth-shaking and thunderous way she does, and the storm between them wages on.

They reach an unspoken truce when, seven weeks later, the cast comes off and the hairs on her mended arm has become darker and longer out of lack of sunlight. Several boys in class crowd around her, nasty grins on their faces, slapping her with juvenile insults of _hairy arse_ and _monkey_ and _Tarzan in drag_.

James Potter rises to his fullest height and punches all of them square in the face.

\--

Petunia tells her to suck in her stomach. At _almost-sixteen_ – two years Lily’s senior – Petunia insists on knowing the roads and highways of the world of women, as if the appliance of lipstick is the hallmark of maturity. Lily challenges her on this, and they don’t talk for a long time.

On her thirteenth birthday, Mary, Marlene, and Dorcas take her to the beach, where she collects seashells and swims in a swimsuit that didn't fit her skin just right. A beautiful woman, older but not old, hips wide but not fat, wades into the sea – a soulmate mark in the shape of a crashing wave around her neck – and Lily knows then that she wants to be just like that.

She doesn’t want to be Petunia’s idea of _woman_ , perfect nails and hairless legs and impeccable hair, a door open for perfection in place of her raw, messy heart. She doesn’t know what she will be – with her stinging tongue and hairy arms and saggy stomach, she just spills over the lines of what she learns a girl should be.

She tries to tell her best friend this, but Sev has bigger problems; his dad just lost his job at Cokeworth’s paper factory, his mom is losing herself bit by bit to cigarettes and drink, and he himself is a gangly, sour-eyed mess of a boy. Lily gives Sev half the birthday seashells (even if he claims to hate _all_ pretty things) and they climb onto the balcony to count the January stars.

She will always wonder what his soulmate mark is. He never told her.

Potter sends her a copy of _Anne of Green Gables_ as a surprise gift. She frowns over possible ulterior motives, but decides to give him the benefit of the doubt. When she gets to the part where Anne Shirley breaks a slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head for his calling her ‘carrots,’ there is an annotation on the sidelines that reads: _They took a leaf out of our book, Evans._

She smiles.

\--

James loses his virginity to an eighteen-year-old whose name he doesn’t know. The girl’s mark – he couldn’t remember what it was – nestles between her breasts and all he could think of during the drunken quick-and-clumsy tumble was _lilies, lilies, lilies._ White, scarlet, orange.

But he doesn’t think of her name.

Around her, he is all boastful talk and boyish flirtation, clammy palms and stumbling heartbeat. Sirius teases him mercilessly about having the same mark as the flower in her name, and with any other girl this might encourage him even further, but with Lily Evans it just makes the aching storm in his stomach much louder and bigger.

Meanwhile, Lily wills herself to stop finding Severus everywhere she goes. She’s never been good at letting go, never been eager to cut her losses and accept defeat, but she has to do this, _needs_ to do this. She tosses away all his cigarettes, returns his chemistry books, deletes his number, unfriends him on Facebook even though he never even opens Facebook.

She is fifteen, more of an almost-woman than a girl, and she has never been more miserable.

She wonders if she even knows what a friend is anymore. Her first was Petunia, the elder sister who could do no wrong, who wore her makeup like armor and unsheathed her sharp tongue like a sword. That was before they drifted apart, years of petty fights and stinging comments and taking each other for granted built up into a rubble too high to climb over.

Despite herself, she finds herself walking to the dreary creek she and Sev used to play pirates in, thinking of summers where they lost themselves in blue skies and apple trees and mindless chatter. Then she thought of the tiresome back-and-forth of fighting and forgiving, the past year of Mulciber and Avery looming overhead their friendship, their stilted conversations as they try to navigate common ground that doesn’t involve social politics or immigration laws, lest Sev showed his colors of bigotry.

Marlene tells her to start taking people at their face value. “Stop trying to find signs and deeper meanings in everything, love. Sometimes shit people are just shit.”

–

She traces the prongs on her body with a light fingertip and wonders about all the mysteries that lay beneath. She is standing naked in front of her bathroom mirror, her curtain of red hair spilling behind her shoulders. On one hand she is holding up a pair of scissors.

Mary is convinced that cutting her long, thick hair is a terrible sin, while Marlene and Dorcas seem to support her decision, rash as it may seem. Over the summer, Marlene refashioned her hair into a pink pixie (to the detriment of her traditionalist parents), so she ought to know the significance of a makeover.

When the deed is done, Lily’s hair barely grazes her collarbone, and she feels light. Not light enough to heave the whole world from her shoulders, but it is enough for now.

On Monday, Potter’s eyes widened – just slightly – as he took her in. They are biology lab partners, and his chatter is one of the few things keeping her awake so early in the morning.

(“You are a changed person, Evans,” he whistles. “What next, you wear green sneakers instead of white?”

“You’re thinking ahead for once,” she smirks.

“Well, one of us has to.”)

She joins his ‘solo study group’ and meets with him in the library every Tuesday and Thursday, where they did less revising and more of sneaking chips under the table and taking the mickey out of each other. They go through two weeks before evacuating to the toasty coffee-shop down the street, after she saw Severus scowling at them from behind a library computer.

He’s still a little arrogant, a little immature, his hair a manmade mess and his swagger making him look like a cock of the walk. But she smiles a little more when he’s around.

\--

He takes her out to a fish and chips shop for her seventeenth. From where he’s standing, Lily glows like a fucking night light in the dark, her hair the color of beautiful wildfire. Their date – for that is what it is, in his mind – passes by in a whirl of laughter and warmth.

“So,” she jabs at him. “What plans have you got after school?”

He makes a face. “No clue. I figure I’d live off some rich cougar’s generosities.” She snorts. “And help around with my parents’ philanthropic charities, continue the benevolent Potter legacy.”

“That’s surprising,” Lily smirks. “I always thought you were particularly Laodicean.”

“Christ, and you call _me_ posh? I’m not the one using words like Lao-whosit.”

“Yeah, but I’m the right kind of posh, see.”

“Oh, so you think you’re better than the rest of us lowly mortals because you read every Jane bloody Austen novel and can recite John Keats at the drop of a hat?”

“Well, I’m never one to deny my own achievements,” she dusts the salt off her fingers on a napkin, “and don’t pretend that _you_ don’t like it.”

His hand pauses around a glass of water. She reddens, but just a little – she is too much of herself to be embarrassed. “I do. Like it, I mean – I like every part of you.”

“I like you too, you fool,” she squeezes his hand. James’ heart feels like it’s about to jump out of his chest and conquer the whole universe. “Is this the part where you ask me out? Properly and not in a pigheaded way, like all the other times.”

“You’re right. I’m too young and beautiful to waste anymore of my love life.”

She kicks his shin. “ _James_.”

“ _Lily_. Alright, alright would you do me the amazing, magnificent, utterly wonderful honor of being my – er, girlfriend?”

“Yes, I believe that’s the word. Mind you, I’m a fan of holding hands.”

“And _I’m_ rather fond of – if it’s not vulgar of me to say so – cuddling.”

She playfully places a hand over her lips. “Potter! Do you kiss girls with that mouth?”

“You wanna find out?”

\--

The lily glows in a hundred lights, different shades of orange or red or pearly whites on different days. It comes alive on his skin, formed into it like the love in his lungs.

The prongs grow enough antlers until they are connected, right at the dip of her breasts. He spends many mornings lazily trailing the lines with his tongues, fingers, eyes, and she feels complete.


End file.
